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Streams Property Characterisation in Waste Biorefineries Using an Ontology Approach

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Abstract

In the context of population growth and climate change, there is a high need towards reducing theuse of virgin resources, and recovering of materials from waste for reusing purposes. All these trends are reflected in studies concerning waste biorefineries development [1-3], waste valorisation[4,5], resource recovery [6] and circular economy concepts [7]. Recent research in the area of ontology engineering lead to the development of semantically-enabled repositories for biorefineries [8] which are generic and which can be extended to other types of problems, such as waste biorefineries [1] and/or Industrial Symbiosis as initial and prerequisite step towards full scale circular economy [9]. The aim of this work is to advance the currently available repositories for a waste biorefinery by adding a new layer of detail within the ontology concerning stream chemical and properties characterisation. The work offers a systematic approach to the collection, classification, repositories and ontology building for organic waste streams, and includes the necessary methodologies and workflows for expanding the current repository. The work consists of a detailed literature review and industrial data collection for the classification of the streams according to processing technologies. A detailed repository of models to describe all the properties of the involved streams is included as well. This work aims at expanding existing repository for waste biorefinery, within the framework of RENESENG II project.